Anna Held: She, of the Milk Baths

Today is Anna Held’s birthday, she of the famous milk baths. Before becoming Flo Ziegfeld’s second great entrepreneurial project (after strongman Eugene Sandow) the Polish-born Held was a star of the Parisian variety stage. Ziegfeld discovered her there in 1896 and brought her back to the states, where together they made millions of dollars on Broadway. Their most famous publicity stunt had Held taking frightfully decadent baths in in tubs full of milk carted in daily from a local dairy. Her pregnancy in 1908 kept her out of the first Follies (the format of which she is said to have suggested) and then caused Ziegfeld to dump her in favor of Lilliane Lorraine. Whereupon she went back to vaudeville, touring the U.S. and France throughout WWI. She died of cancer in 1918. The moral? Milk gives you cancer.

In the clip below from the movie Ziegfeld: The Man and His Women, Held is played byBarbara Parkins, best known as the lead in Valley of the Dolls who was neither Patty Duke nor Sharon Tate. Here she sings “I Just Can’t Make My Eyes Behave” (Parkins appears after about a minute into the clip). As usual in nearly every movie I’ve ever seen, the costumes are wildly innaccurate, anachronistic, preposterous. But I wouldn’t change a thing!

Published by travsd

Writer and performer Trav S.D. (www.travsd.com) has written for the NY Times, the Village Voice, American Theatre, Time Out NY, Reason, the Villager and numerous other publications. He has been in the vanguard of New York’s vaudeville and burlesque scenes since 1995 when he launched his company Mountebanks, which has presented hundreds of top variety acts ranging from Todd Robbins to Dirty Martini to Lady Rizo to the Flying Karamazov Brothers. He has directed his own plays, revues and solo pieces in NYC since 1989 at such venues as Joe’s Pub, La Mama, Dixon Place, Theater for the New City, the Ohio Theatre and the Brick. In 2014 he produced and directed the smash-hit I’ll Say She Is, the first ever revival of the Marx Brothers hit 1924 Broadway show in the NY International Fringe Festival. He is perhaps best known for his 2005 book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, recently cited by Bette Midler in People magazine as one of her favorite book. More about All Things Trav S.D. are at: http://travsd.com/
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[…] out of steam and Ziegfeld broke into Broadway musicals, famously making a star of French chorine Anna Held, through a barrage of clever stunts such as giving out to the press that she took daily baths in […]